Harvard Square

By Melvin Maddocks

OTHER MEN'S DAUGHTERS

by RICHARD G. STERN

244 pages. Dut+on. $6.95.

Dr. Robert Merriwether, a Harvard professor, 42, still fit from sculling on the Charles--and lonely from puttering in the lab--makes the familiar, by now ritualistic slip. While wife and children splash off the coast of Maine, he has an affair with a Radcliffe summer student, a girl young enough, as the saying goes, to be his daughter.

"Habits get you through life, not into it," Merriwether cries, and the male-menopausal debate--life-as-reason-and-light v. life-as-Dionysian-flame--is on. No novelist could improve upon Richard (Golk) Stern's inventory of what Merriwether has to lose. The Stern Cambridge is full of 90-year-old gabled and bay-window-bellied houses, just a gentlemanly stroll from the Square's latest Marx brothers festival. In a hundred Victorian parlors like the Merriwethers', attractive parents and children play recorders and sing lieder or Cole Porter. Leather editions on subjects like Provencal poetry decorate the walls. Pedigreed dogs, knowledgeably named in Russian or even Japanese, bunk into a birch-log fire. There is a golden glow of "we": husbands and wives, colleagues, the chosen circles at dinner parties off Brattle Street, the community of the faculty club. Must Dr. Merriwether, who teaches introductory physiology, give up all this Good Life for his Cynthia, "golden-haired but almost Indian dark, slimly full, tall . . . her hair waterfalled to the top thoracic vertebra," etc., etc.?

Alas, Stern makes a better case for the middle-aged languors of Cambridge than for the pleasures of Cynthia. His very strengths--irony, elegance of style, that passion for exactness--trip him up. His heart may be romantic, but his mind keeps playing all these little jokes on his lovers. When the professor kisses, deft quotes seem to materialize like subtitles on a screen. Harrumphs of academic self-approval seem to plonk into the nearest pillow as narcissistic asides. No matter how Stern tries to turn loose the Merriwether demon, it insists on fixing its tie, unwildly holding doors open, and speaking with a broad a.

This is an attractive book and occasionally an extraordinarily touching one--especially where Stern is dealing with parents' love for children. "Love," he wrote in an earlier novel, "is not a fixed relationship, only a kind of fund that underwrites all sorts of behavior." Other Men's Daughters skillfully illustrates that point again.

Finally, though, self-consciousness--the bane of academe as well as the bane of the contemporary novel--inhibits Stern from writing his love story and Merriwether from living it. They just aren't up to their fantasies. At novel's end, the reader can imagine Merriwether marrying Cynthia, buying another gabled Cambridge house, maybe even starting a second family--working, that is, toward a decent, intelligent synthesis of tradition and rebirth.

The one thing the reader cannot imagine is Merriwether's ecstasy or pain really breaking through his creamy Harvard style. As if reversing Merriwether's dictum, Other Men's Daughters finally says what Stern may least want it to say: "Life gets you--through habits." .Melvin Maddocks

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